Sunday, 31 December 2017

Having studied Architecture, Alfredo Jaar turned to social engaged art as he enjoyed the freedom it gave him. “I am free to speculate, I am free to dream a better world, and I can only do that in the art world”.

Jaar's work questions humanitarian issues such as the refugee crisis and grief. His exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park spans the Underground Gallery and the open air space in front of the gallery.

Outside, in the gravel path leading up to the Underground Gallery, Jaar has installed 101 trees in a grid with walkable passageways between. Masked by, and positioned within the grid of trees there are nine stainless steel frames structures. These are said to reference ‘black sites’, the secret detention facilities operated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) around the world where human beings are being tortured and killed.

"I will not act on the world if I do not understand the world." ALFREDO JAAR

In the first room in the gallery the audience meets a wall of bright light forming one of the sides of an installation booth in which visitors are invited to sit and watch a film. The film, The Sound of Silence (2005), reveals the story of a young victim of the 1993 Sudanese famine. Nearing the end of the film, a sudden flash of light reinforces the drama within the narrative.

Jaar's play on light and dark is continued in another room in which a full colour image taken by photographer Koen Wessing of two grieving daughters morph into black and white silhouettes. Shadows (2014) continues in the adjacent space where six additional images taken on the same day show the family's trauma after the murder of a farmer.

"Generally we are taught how to read, but we are not taught how to look." ALFREDO JAAR

A Hundred Times Nguyen (1994) is a work that is based on an experience that Jaar had when he was visiting ‘refugee detention centres’ in Hong Kong in 1991. In the centre of the gallery there is a vitrine containing the story that lead to the work. Jaar had requested permission to photograph a girl, Nguyen Thi Thuy, who later became emotionally attached to him. Jaar photographed her five times at five-second intervals. Out of the hundreds of images he took while he was in Hong Kong, it was these five images that Jaar was most drawn to. It is these that he has replicated and displayed in various orders in A Hundred Times Nguyen. Personally, I do not think that the images need to be shown 100 times for it to be powerful. It was actually the story that I was moved by, and I felt that the images were unnecessary.

Wednesday, 27 December 2017

BBC Radio 1 have a programme called My Mind and Me which covers topics relating to mental health.

Episodes include:

Dealing with depression

Tips to beat stress

What is mental health?

Dealing with abuse

The latest set of episodes is all about hearing voices. Over 10 episodes the story of Alice is told.

"Imagine hearing voices in your head. Alice does. She’s a 27-year-old mum who’s had different characters in her mind since she was about 15. They all have names and personalities and they can be hard to ignore. Alice wants to tell you about them so you can understand what it's like to live with schizophrenia."

- Donna - Join Alice as she invites you to meet the very first voice she ever heard, Donna. Welcome to her inner world.

- Rose and Rachel - Join Alice as she gets her revenge on a couple of voices in her head. They're a tricky pair, Rose and Rachel, but Alice has worked out how she can get her own back.

- Michael - This is a love story between Alice and someone very special to her. You'll find out what happened when the voice she loved the most in the world turned into one of her most frightening.

- Mum and Dad - As if things weren't confusing enough for Alice, she started hearing her mum and dad's voices in her head. But, they weren't exactly like her parents in real life.

- Celebrity voices - Alice's voices are often frightening, but in this episode she reveals how she hears celebrity voices which lighten the mood. She even has a bit of a crush on one of them.

- Tony - Leaving the house can be hard sometimes for Alice because that's when she'll hear muffled voices from crowds in the street or supermarket. It's confusing and makes her feel paranoid, but she's learnt over the years how to cope with it.

- Ricky - Alice talks about how sometimes when she's feeling low, she self-harms. But there's a voice which can lift her mood and sometimes she pines to hear from Ricky.

- Joshua - Alice's positivity oozes through this episode. She's in a good place in her life right now and she talks about the voice which reflects this and that's Joshua. She also reveals her plans for the future, which include maths... and bras. Prepare to be inspired.

- Stigma - We're nearing the end of Alice's story and she wants to deal with some of the stigma surrounding schizophrenia. Some people assume those with the illness are deluded all the time and that they never have any sense of reality. In this episode Alice explains why that's actually far from the truth.

- Last voice - Over the years Alice has experienced positive and negative voices, in this final episode she reveals whether she'd get rid of them if she could. It's a difficult question and her answer might surprise you.

Sunday, 24 December 2017

Wishing you a very Happy Christmas and hoping that 2018 is filled with happiness, good health and creativity.

As I reflect on what has been a challenging but exciting year, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support and interest in what I am doing in the studio.

Here are some of my highlights from 2017

RAISE A MUG TO NEWBRIDGE!

I collaborated with NewBridge studio holder Holly Wheeler to make an artwork celebrating the relocation of The NewBridge Project from NewBridge Street West to Carliol House.

The stress and hassle of the move has been worthwhile as I now enjoy working in my wonderful studio.

After devoting the initial few months of the year to writing proposals and submitting applications, the work paid off as I was awarded funding from Arts Council to support my year-long project, Voices : Within and Without.

In April I was fortunate enough to participate in the one-of-a-kind Spoken Word residency at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada. It was an amazing experience where I learned a great deal and made some incredible friends.

My four-channel audio installation, Everything Will Be Alright, was exhibited in the Stables Gallery at Cheeseburn Sculpture during the May Open Weekend.

Artist Melinda McGarry invited me to work towards an exhibition to take place in her barn in Hexham next year.

In July I delivered 'A lot can happen in a day', a day-long writing and performance workshop, which culminated in hosted a performance evening at Turf Projects in London.

I was asked by Juliet Fleming to write about her solo exhibition Something Coquettish at The House of Blah Blah in Middlesbrough.

I exhibited in Reality Check, the inaugural exhibition at The NewBridge Project:Gateshead.

The Drone Ensemble, the 'group' that I perform with, have had a number of gigs, one of which was at The Sage as part of TUSK music festival.

I have enjoyed increasing my skills through a risograph and a camera-less film workshop.

I also enjoyed developing a Spoken Word and performance workshop which I delivered at Newcastle University. It was a huge success with the students, and I intend to deliver more of these workshops at other educational establishments.

2018 is set to be a busy year as I already have a number of exhibitions lined up:* March 2018 - Bitter Sweet Group Exhibition - Assembly House, Leeds* April 2018 - Voices: Within and Without Solo Exhibition - The Word, South Shields* TBA shortly - Top secret for now! Press announcement expected in January

Hope you enjoy the festive period and that 2018 is a cracking good one for all.

Wednesday, 20 December 2017

Each Drone Ensemble performance is unique and we respond intuitively to each other and improvise. However, we usually follow a rough score to help us all keep on time and to give us a degree of structure.

This is the score that we followed when performing in An Artistic Encounter at The Great North Museum:Hancock.

Tuesday, 19 December 2017

Many thanks to all who came to experience The Drone Ensemble play at The Great North Museum: Hancock as part of An Artistic Encounter.

Unfortunately I did not get the chance to see any of the other artworks properly as we were so busy setting up the instruments and warming up for the performance, but the whole evening seemed to go down very well with the audience. Showing such a great mix of artworks within the museum collection may introduce a new audience to The Great North Museum: Hancock. Likewise, those familiar with the museum may have been introduced to new artistic experiences. An Artistic Encounter may have stimulated regular visitors may to view the collection in new ways. Hopefully, this all bodes well for the possibility of more of these kind of events in the future.Playing in these different contexts gives The Drone Ensemble a focus for each performance, and we adapt in a site-specific manner and according to the conditions and themes of each event. I find this an exciting way to work and it helps us progress and vary our performances.

Thursday, 14 December 2017

In this programme, performer Eloise Garland investigates how people with hearing loss engage with music.

"Eloise began to lose her own hearing fifteen years ago. Now aged 23, she's a professional singer, violinist and teacher - and reveals her very personal engagement with sound.

She considers different ways of teaching and appreciating music - some of which might surprise people who aren't deaf - and shares her deep emotional connection to an art form and cultural activity that is so strongly associated with hearing.

Eloise also meets Tarek Atoui, a composer and sound artist who brings together deaf and hearing people to make music with special instruments designed to expand the experience of sound beyond the aural. If music cannot be heard, what are the other ways of listening?"

The difference between hearing and listening is discussed; hearing is using the ears and listening is using the brain and the body.

Friday, 8 December 2017

My research into research auditory and visual hallucinations has revealed that these experiences are more common than I first was aware of.

In a recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Art of Living, the poet Frank Ormsby discusses how his life has changed since he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. His medication, he believes, has aided his creativity. But it has also induced hallucinations. He finds himself sitting on his own in his study but surrounded by people, by the ghosts of his mother-in-law and unidentified visitors. And he's also haunted by a fear that the earth will open up and swallow him.

When he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, his response was unexpected. He embarked on a newly fertile creative period, documenting his experiences and finding a voice in his poetry that he was beginning to lose in his daily communications.

His first act was to search Google - for jokes. "Which would you rather have, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. Obviously Parkinson's! I'd rather spill half my pint than forget where I left it."

As he discusses with Marie-Louise Muir, the illness has changed him. It's mellowed him. After a career as a school teacher, his daily life is now quieter and more solitary. There's a poetry, almost, in his pauses and silences.

I find his following poem about his hallucinations very powerful

"Wherever i sit

at the corner of my eye

they fade in fade out

melt into elsewhere before i can see faces

who is that girl i sense at my shoulder?

who is that dancing lazily on my table until i look up?

are they playing a game?

do they mean me any harm?

not one has appeared twice or uttered a sound

remote, indifferent

they will never amount to a family or a circle of friends

meanwhile

a black spider with its heart in its mouth is legging it across the floor tiles towards the nearest shade

he is strangely human

and visible all the way

so used to them have I become

so aware without thinking of their nameless presence and their ways of peopling a room

Thursday, 7 December 2017

"The Belfast writer, who suffers from hallucinations and twitching, is defiantly upbeat about his condition. He has turned his experiences into a new pamphlet which is being used as a teaching resource for student nurses learning about the degenerative disease.

The poet Frank Ormsby lives with hallucinations and with the prospect of the earth opening up and swallowing him. That is how he describes Parkinson's Disease in a pamphlet of new poems to be launched tomorrow night in Belfast at the famous No Alibis bookshop on Botanic Avenue.

One poem includes the lines: 'Who is that girl I sense at my shoulder? Who is that dancing lazily/on my table until I look up?'

He is surrounded by ghosts. They are no bother to him. He remarks on their lack of energy in one of the poems Hallucinations 3: 'They have the fearsome patience of invalids. Whatever it is they are waiting for, they will wait forever.'

Frank was hospitalised seven years ago with heart failure and diagnosed with diabetes. So he has two afflictions to deal with.

His response to Parkinson's in his poems is a mix of humour and horror. He says: "It is hard to beat humour as an instrument against disease or unhappiness. I suppose as a writer I have always had a strong sense of the absurd."

You might think he would be deeply pained at having to live with hallucinations. In fact, he seems more bemused than bothered. He writes about taking these ghosts for a walk every day round the Waterworks on the Antrim Road, near where he lives. He wonders if the dogs there will sense their auras.

He says: "I think that people just naturally have a certain disposition or temperament and I seem to have the kind of temperament that sets considerable store by jokes and what you call whimsy. I am very glad to have this approach to life. It certainly helps to make negative experience a lot more bearable."

But the story is a sad and shocking one.

"From time to time I would think of the limitations of having this temperament. In these poems there is a certain amount of humour but you could go through them and pull together an awareness of the darker side."

But Frank says he is looking forward to the day Billy Connolly makes his Parkinson's the subject of a stage act. "I think there was always a part of me that wanted to be a stand-up comic."

But is there not a danger that others who have Parkinson's might not appreciate this humour, might find it insensitive to their own experience?

He admits: "I've got certain niggling doubts about that. I could imagine somebody who had Parkinson's say for 10 years or 20 years more than I have had it might listen sceptically to poems like these and say he knows nothing about it.

"Ten years from now, if he survives, let's see if he's laughing then.

"It's not as if I am putting myself forward as the laureate of Parkinson's but I am aware that it could seem like that, especially to someone who had suffered and really suffered for it for much longer than I have."

People who haven't met Frank in recent years but maybe knew him as their teacher when he was head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution will see that he has slowed down, that he speaks much more softly, and that his left arm twitches. He hasn't lost the whimsicality they will be familiar with but they might feel instinctively a bit more protective towards him.

Parkinson's does not kill but it erodes a person progressively.

And the damage shows.

Yet he says: "Funnily enough, I wouldn't describe it as a bad time. That would seem to me to be an exaggeration. I think if I am going to have a bad time it is going to be in the future at some point.

"At the moment, I suppose I have a tremor in my left arm, I have certainly got a lot clumsier when it comes to doing or undoing buttons or tying shoelaces or the ordinary little things that you do in the course of the day. I certainly got slower there.

"Neither of the diseases - I'm talking about the diabetes and Parkinson's - that I have got involve pain, or at least they haven't so far. I suppose the real damage that they do is that they soften you up for heart attacks and strokes and so on, but it's about seven years since I have come out of hospital and in that time I haven't had a single day's illness.

"So I suppose, I feel lucky because of that and maybe that is something that feeds the optimism."

Poets often talk of their ideas coming to them rather than them going out looking for them. They don't sit down in the morning like a working journalist with a job to finish before lunch; though some journalists might think that some poets would be more productive if they did.

Frank says: "I'm always surprised that there are certain subjects that almost put a pressure on you to write about them and there are other subjects that don't. In 2009, I spent three weeks in hospital with heart failure and I went home fully expecting to get a quarter of a book of poems out of this experience but, in fact, I never wrote about it at all.

"Yet when it emerged that I had Parkinson's disease I found myself reading articles watching material about it on TV, discussing it with a few people I knew who were my age and writing this sequence of poems and they came quite quickly over about a month or so."

A psychologist might ask at this point if the poems helped him cope, might assume they were therapeutic.

"I suppose I had some kind of half idea (that they would help me to cope with Parkinson's) but only a half idea.

"I think to sit down with some sort of intention to help yourself or of writing poems as a form of therapy I think would be detrimental to the poems themselves.

"You'd end up with something forced, something jerry built, something that didn't come naturally or had no lightness of touch about it. As it turned out these poems did come fairly easily and I didn't allow myself to become too conscious of them as therapy but I have no doubt that they helped."

In the poems he reflects on the changes in him.

In Side Effects 2 he writes, 'Gone my teacherly gulder. …The voice that broke at thirteen has again broken.'

His former Inst pupils remember him as a teacher who could take charge of a class and be a commanding presence in it. Several senior figures in the Northern Ireland media have sat in front of him while he explained poetry to them. They include BBC NI's Stephen Nolan, the music writer Stuart Bailie and Peter Rainey, who is picture editor at the Belfast Telegraph.

The new poems are already being used in Scotland to train nurses who will be working with patients with Parkinson's, for they bring to life the internal experience of the person you see shuffling and shaking, the arm twitching, the distracted look on the face.

He says: "It all began with a poetry reading I did at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh and two things happened as a result of that reading. One was that the two people who were on Mariscat Press, Hamish White and Diane Hendry, offered to do this pamphlet of the Parkinson's poems and one look at the beautiful pamphlets they had previously done and I was accepting the offer immediately.

"The other, to me, surprising development was that a teaching nurse from the Queen Margaret University approached me. She was teaching a class about neurological diseases and she had the idea previously that she might be able to use poems as a teaching aid. It would be a way of stimulating interest and emphasising certain priorities."

That nurse gave her class the poems "to read and discuss and to explore the various themes and apply them to their own work". She then challenged the student nurses to write poetry in response, using the Japanese haiku form that Frank writes a lot in himself, where each poem has only 17 syllables.

How did that go down with students who were expecting a more practical and scientific education?

Frank says: "I suddenly in the mail had 16 haiku poems arrive. And it was pleasingly evident that they had responded to the main points in the poems and I could suddenly realise how the poems might teach them something."

The connection with the hospital is ongoing.

"I am writing an essay about their responses to the poems. The essay may or may not be published in a journal of nursing research. All this was unexpected but exciting as well."

Monday, 4 December 2017

"Soundscape composer Hildegard Westerkamp hears the world differently than most people. Where many of us might hear noise, she uncovers extraordinary beauty and meaning. It's all in how we listen to our environment.

In this interview, Paul Kennedy joined Hildegard Westerkamp on a sound-walk through Vancouver's downtown eastside, and explored how opening our ears to our surroundings can open our minds.

Westerkamp uses environmental sounds her instruments. She refrains from using any effects, and feels it is important to do her own field recording as opposed to using pre-recorded sounds and it encourages her to listen actively. When in the studio, re-listening to her field recordings, Westerkamp often picks up on other sounds that she had not previously heard because she does not have as many other sounds competing for her attention.

"To be in the present as a listener is a revolutionary act. We absolutely need it, to be grounded in that way."She comments that people no longer practice listening to the environment, are afraid of silence and so turn to music to fill the perceived void.

"People are afraid of silence, because it's perceived as a vacuum. It's not perceived as a source of inspiration…. The tools to search out the environmental sounds that heal us have been lessened as a result.""Listening will help us reconnect to the environment. If we can understand what listening can do to reconnect us to our environment, we can understand what's happening to our environment... we would be enriched, hugely."

Friday, 1 December 2017

On Wednesday 13th December The Drone Ensemble will be performing as part of An Artistic Encounter, an evening of contemporary art and live music staged amongst the collections of the Great North Museum: Hancock.

It is hosted by Connecting Principle, the multi-disciplinary research forum at Newcastle University.

The digital artworks showcased will be set in dialogue with the museum's rich collections of natural history, archaeology, geology and world cultures.

The project builds on a collaborative research project between Newcastle University, Montpellier University, La Panacée: Centre d’art contemporaine, Montpellier, and the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier Agglomeration. In an exhibition staged in University of Montpellier’s medieval libraries, a series of newly commissioned artworks were presented in response to artefacts held in their historical scientific, medical and art collections.

Connecting Principle is an art centred international multi-disciplinary research forum at Newcastle University instigating a dialogue between art and other disciplines. The aim of the forum is to increase opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration within academia and independently. Connecting Principle sees itself as an international network of artists, theorists and researchers.

Biography

Helen Shaddock (born United Kingdom, 1986) is an artist based in Newcastle whose practice incorporates, video, sound, writing, installation, sculpture and performance.

She completed a MFA with distinction at Newcastle University in 2016 after graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 2008 with a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Art: Sculpture and Environmental Art.

In 2016 she was the recipient of the Hatton Award and was awarded with a Graduate Studio at The NewBridge Project, Newcastle.

Shaddock has gained Arts Council England Grants for the Arts funding for her current project ‘Voices: Within and Without’, in which she is working with other voice hearers, artists, researchers, academics and Mental Health organisations to investigate auditory hallucinations, the experience of hearing voices.

In May 2017 Shaddock returned from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity where she participated in a Spoken Word residency. She recently presented her four-channel audio installation ‘Everything Will Be Alright’ at Cheeseburn, Northumberland. Forthcoming events include ‘A lot can happen in a day’ at TURF Projects, London in July 2017 and a solo exhibition at The Word, South Shields in April 2018.